Last Wednesday, Celent hosted its sixth annual Banking Innovation & Insight Day. We had a full house of energetic attendees, and a solid crew of dynamic panelists and presenters. For the first time, Celent combined the Banking and Insurance events with a welcome by Celent CEO, Craig Weber introducing creative disruption and recognizing winners of the “Innovation is…” competition. The competition was inspired by the Earnest Hemmingway six word-long story. To capture the essence of innovation with utmost brevity, here are the six finalists: 1. Human generated evolution 2. Creating tomorrow’s today. 3. Nowhere. Now here. 4. Bringing dreams into reality before others. 5. Transforming lateral thinking into practical reality. 6. Repeat. “Try. Fail. Modify.” Until success. Next, Keynote speaker, Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) electrified the audience with wisdom and enthusiasm. Jeanne presented a compelling case for developing a culture of innovation using case studies from Amazon, Apple, Credit Suisse, Foxtel, Guess and USAA. The audience was a blaze with tweets as Jeanne presented CISR research on the topic. After a networking break, the audience was treated to a panel discussion, Multichannel Delivery: Raising the Bar, featuring Dan Dickinson (BMO), Tom Poole (Capital One) Kim Summerrow (Bank of America) and Mike Young (Everbank). The panel advanced many themes including: how to sell in self-service channels, the longevity of the branch channel influence, channel self-sufficiency and the need to banish “single channel” initiatives forever. Following lunch we were extremely honoured to present Celent Model Bank awards to 20 financial institutions. Each of the 21 initiatives are presented as case studies in the report: Celent Model Bank 2013: Case Studies of Effective use of Technology in Banking. Celent clients may download the report here. The audience then enjoyed the privilege of hearing from Sergio Fidalgo, CIO, BBVA Compass, Celent’s Model Bank of the Year, as he presented the largest, successful, U.S. core banking transformation project in the past ten years. Following Sergio’s presentation, Celent Senior Analyst Zil Bareisis presented a thorough discussion Debunking Mobile Payment Myths: 1. Mobile Payments = NFC 2. One wallet will rule them all 3. Banks don’t have to/can’t do much about mobile payments All presentations from the event are available for Celent clients to download on our web site. We look forward to seeing you at our next event!